I Learnt At An Early Age The Art Of Getting An Authentic Fire And How To Keep It Burning
When I was a lad I joined the Cub Scouts at the age of 8, and at ten I went on my first camp as part of the preparation for joining the Scouts the coming year. It was an eye-opener, I loved it and the best thing was that the site we went to, which wasn’t a long way from home but distant enough away to feel remote and exotic, permitted open fires to be build by each tent.
The initial task we had to do was to dig a large hole, a job for the junior campers, obviously, and then we had to go out into the woods to hunt around the surroundings for wood and other suitably combustible material to put into the pyre. We were allowed to use matches (I can still hear Baden-Powell’s teeth gnashing) but nothing else and the cubs were allotted the job of trying to light it.
Naturally we just chucked everything in and set about using up the matches we were supplied with with no luck at all, at which time the patrol leader (scout troops are broken down into patrols with a leader and a deputy) cleared everything away and showed us how to make a little pile of twigs and sticks which were padded with paper and other quick burning materials. The match was applied and as the fire took hold of the wood, more substantial sticks were applied and the flames fanned quickly and that was it. Following that we were able to keep the fire going for the whole weekend. We used it for boiling water for drinking and washing up but best of all, when it burnt down sufficiently, we put grills over it and cooked on it.
It was the first time I’d experienced a barbeque which these days sounds a bit daft, but then (in the mid seventies) people didn’t really do cooking in the open air.
At home were quite ahead of the game as soon after the camp, my dad had gone to the States for the first time and had come back from California where he’d been invited to someone’s house for a weekend and they’d had a party which was centred around a Charcoal barbeque.
Newly enthused, it did not be long after he came back that he went and found one to buy, which wasn’t an easy thing to do as they weren’t widely available and you couldn’t research via the Internet. But he bought one, a Charcoal bbq in a particularly awful shade of orange that was popular in the 70’s, and with great pomp we constructed it in the garden. As the newly experienced fire lighter, I was delegated with the task of getting the fire lit and so began our first family barbeque.
It was in the family for many years as the charcoal barbeque was the only option, the alternatives came in terms of size and clour. They were all the same in terms of being mostly a rectangular pot on legs with slots for inserting the grill across the top. Most didn’t even have a top but they did work as long as you could get the fire lit in the first place. And that was not easy because fuel stations didn’t have bags of coals, and the coals you could buy weren’t treated to make them easy to ignite or come in a bag that you put a match to. It all had to be done correctly using either heating coal or wood. You could get firelighters but the challenge with them was that they could linger and very often if one used too many, it could get into the smoke and affect the taste of the food.
In later years, the old faithful charcoal bbq was replaced, superseded with a gas version but it opened our eyes to the issue of cooking outside and we retained a little portable barbeque for days out.
Mail this post